Lives of Poets

Lives of Poets

What makes me wonder

Is not why writers and poets

So young and old

Succumb to emptiness. 

It is the lives they had lived

Under the bright sky. 

Things they must have seen 

To mold those words of bitterness. 

From Homer’s Olympus heights

To Byron’s mountain of light. 

From the banks of a gushing Nile

to the flows of Mega’s Mississippi might. 

Mountains, rivers, hills, and streams

Have molded words and wondrous dreams. 

Dripping blood mixed with ink

Together they form a hidden link. 

Don’t let your bullets fly

Nor blades invade your vital stream,

Until all rivers have run dry 

And the Sun has set its final beam.